Gordon Goody, a Leader of the Gang in the Great Train Robbery, Dies at 85

Gordon Goody, who combined the rakishness of James Bond with the bravado of Jesse James to help conjure up Britain’s daredevil Great Train Robbery in 1963, died on Friday in Mojácar, Spain. He was 85.

His death was confirmed by officials in Mojácar, his adopted Andalusian town on the Mediterranean, where he owned and ran the Chiringuito Kon Tiki beachfront bar after he was released from prison in 1975. No cause was specified, but he was reported to have had emphysema.

Mr. Goody’s death is believed to leave only two surviving members of the unarmed 15-man gang that staged the robbery, an audacious, nighttime ambush of the Glasgow-to-London Royal Mail train on Aug. 8, 1963.

It was the world’s largest cash robbery at the time. The gang made off with 2.6 million pounds, or the equivalent of nearly $50 million today. Little of the take, including Mr. Goody’s share, which would be worth about $3.6 million today, was recovered.

After serving 12 years of a 30-year sentence, Mr. Goody left the country and largely faded away — the gang’s Quiet Man figure. Out of public view for nearly four decades, he resurfaced several years ago, granting interviews on the 50th anniversary of the heist and co-writing a book, “How to Rob a Train,” published in 2014.

“I think it’s fair to say that without me there wouldn’t have been a Great Train Robbery,” Mr. Goody gloated.

It was Mr. Goody who was first alerted by his sometime lawyer that the mail train might be vulnerable to a gutsy and well-organized robbery. He then enlisted his occasional partner in crime, Bruce Reynolds.

While Mr. Goody was always considered one of the masterminds of the plot, he resented the fact that Mr. Reynolds was most often identified as the gang’s chief architect. (Mr. Reynolds died in 2013.)

“I do take exception to being referred to, as I have been from time to time, as Bruce’s number two,” Mr. Goody wrote. “I wasn’t number two to anybody.”

Accounts vary, but Douglas Gordon Goody wrote that he was born in Oxford, Northern Ireland, in 1930 (most sources say on March 11) to a soldier and a maid but was reared by an aunt and uncle, a chicken farmer. He attended a one-room school, he said, and recalled one teacher as a “brutal pig.”

Reunited with his parents in London during World War II, he was arrested for the first time when he was 17 on charges of mugging a gay man who had made sexual advances to one of Mr. Goody’s friends. He was sentenced to 21 months in prison and 12 lashes with birch branches.

By mid-1963 Mr. Goody was already a career criminal, a 33-year-old ex-convict with nine verdicts against him. A brawny 6-foot-3, he was a charismatic playboy who wore bespoke suits and a Rolex watch and drove a Jaguar.

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The Glasgow-to-London mail train that was hijacked on Aug. 8, 1963, by Gordon Goody and 14 other men. The gang made off with the equivalent of $50 million today, then the largest cash robbery in the world. Little of the take, including Mr. Goody’s $3.6 million share, was recovered.CreditAssociated Press

At the time of the robbery Mr. Goody was engaged to a woman about 10 years his junior, though he still lived with his mother in a modest cottage in Putney in southwest London. He had had “Dear Mother” tattooed on one arm.

He was often described in news accounts as a hairdresser, but he had actually only invested some of his ill-gotten gains in salons.

The lawyer who tipped him off about the mail train was fed details by a mysterious informant, a Belfast-born postal worker known only as “the Ulsterman.” Mr. Goody finally identified him by name in a 2014 documentary, “A Tale of Two Thieves.”

Mr. Goody was one of only two gang members who had contrived an alibi, but it collapsed when the plotters postponed the robbery after they had learned that the next day’s train would be carrying even more cash.

The ambush had all the trappings of a western. Mr. Goody was said to have been the quartermaster, wrangling the necessary vehicles and other matériel.

Hijacking a speeding diesel locomotive near Cheddington, just north of London, proved surprisingly simple: The thieves placed a glove over the green railway signal and attached a battery to illuminate the red bulb.

But after the police found the gang’s farm hide-out, most of the suspects were captured two weeks later. Mr. Goody was seized at the Leicester Grand Hotel with his girlfriend after a barmaid had mistakenly identified him as Mr. Reynolds.

At Mr. Goody’s sentencing, Justice Edmund Davies said: “You present to the court one of the saddest problems by which it is confronted in the trial. You have manifest gifts of personality and intelligence which might have carried you far had they been directed to honesty.”

Released from prison 12 years later, Mr. Goody moved in with his ailing mother again, complaining that too much of his loot had been spent on legal fees or plundered by a friend he had entrusted it to.

Moving to Spain, he pursued a relatively quiet life with his longtime partner, Maria, with whom he had a daughter. He told The Guardian in 2014 that he had advised her son, “Don’t ever try to imitate your granddad.”

In 2013, in a BBC mini-series about the train robbery, Mr. Goody was played by Paul Leonard.

Mr. Goody became a friendly presence in Mojácar as the proprietor of the beachfront bar. In a notice on its municipal website, officials there lauded him as “a complete gentleman, far removed from the image that those who didn’t know him might have had from those difficult years that marked a large part of his life.”

The notice added, “We will always remember his smile and his big heart that was always open to those around him.”

Regardless of his image, Mr. Goody had no illusions about his career goals.

“My old man wanted me to be a plumber’s mate,” he recalled. “I wanted to be a criminal. You never have to work hard to be a criminal. You do something, see something, you’ve no money, you take it.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B16 of the New York edition with the headline: Gordon Goody Dies at 85; Was a Leader of the Gang in the Great Train Robbery. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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